Scorpio intro	Styling	Design & engineering	Manufacturing	Marketing	Service & maintenance	About my Scorpio

In 1996 I acquired a proud and wonderful Ford AG publication called "Unser Werk: Wir bauen den SCORPIO" (Our achievement: We build the SCORPIO). It's filled with photos of the facilities, the machines and the people of the Niehl Plant in Cologne. Like all the resources I'm using for this webpage, it'll be with me for your inspection (not purchase; sorry) at Carlisle '97.

Here are a few excerpts from it. I apologize for the meager accompanying text. The booklet is in German. I was agonizingly unsuccessful in learning German for our 25th wedding anniversary trip to Europe. My wife and I spent two weeks eating ham omelets and green salads because they were the only two foods I knew how to order. The marriage survived, which is a great deal more than I can say about my interest in omelets....

The Cologne plant was divided into three parts: presses and coachwork (shown on this conceptual floorplan as gray), painting and plastics fabrication (pink), and subsystem and final assembly and finishing (blue). Please do not adjust your set; the diagram truly is unintelligible at this scale. It's not all that clear if you click on it to enlarge it, because the original three-page diagram is two feet wide. I'm showing it here merely to indicate the relative proportions of areas dedicated to the three types of work.

The drawing below shows the 70-meter 11-station assembly line where the Scorpio's underbody, upper body and roof came together. Each separate station is represented here by a little blue Scorp-embryo. The underbodies were arriving at the first station (far left) from an adjacent line where 32 robots had performed 420 welding operations to help give our Scorpios their rigidity. The third station is where the upper bodies, arriving from another site not shown here, were lowered into place. They were welded into a unitized structure in stations four through seven. In the bottom center of the drawing you can see two robots placing roof panels on a conveyer into station eight for welding in station nine. The final two stations were for smaller, more delicate operations.

Some talented artist spent a lot of time making that drawing, whether by hand or with the aid of a computer. It couldn't have been traced from a photo, because there'd have been no way to place the camera for such a view. Ford AG must simply have decided that pride and reputation were adequate justifications for the expense. Wouldn't it be nice if the US headquarters had the same attitude?

As you'd expect, the Niehl Plant was peppered with robots throughout the manufacturing process. To maintain the Scorpio's exceptionally tight tolerances, laser-equipped robots checked key measurements at every critical step of the fabrication, confirming the evolving car's adherence to specifications and building a database of deviations for further refining the plant's operation. This is one reason why if the Scorpio ahead of you can fit between two police cruisers, so can yours.

Seriously, did you ever notice that it's easier to open a door when the moonroof's open? Tight tolerances mean you're working against a vacuum if there's no way for the air pressure to equalize quickly.

And did you notice also that your Scorpio's door hinges are welded in place, rather than bolted as with some other cars? One of the 160+ robots did that after positioning the door perfectly. In this photo you can see the orange-colored jig holding the back door in alignment while a welding arm works on the hinges.

I recall watching the assembly process at GM's Fisher Body plant in the mid-1960's. One man would position a door while a second man bolted the hinges tight and then pounded on the doorframe with a big rubber mallet to make it fit the opening. (To be fair, GM does it differently today: the mallet is plastic.)

It's nice to know that some of the old skills still had value, though. After the coat of primer paint was applied to a Scorpio by a robot and baked dry, real human beings buffed it smooth and then removed the dust.

In fact, there was quite a bit of hand work in the Scorpio. For example, much of the upholstery was pieced together on industrial versions of your home sewing-machine and then laid by hand onto the seats' supportive foam over a brushed-on adhesive. And those upholstery materials, whether cloth or leather, were thick. My gauge measures the leather and the cloth (with its fuzz crushed) at a little over 0.05 inches, just shy of a sixteenth. Even though their high quality makes both materials supple, they can't have been easy to manipulate. For any given seam the needle had to penetrate almost an eighth of an inch (and over 3/16ths where the seam included piping), and the pieces had to stay perfectly in contact around some fairly complex three-dimensional curves.

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